I'll sorta apologize for hi-jacking this thread first, although since the thread wasn't a serious discussion anyways, hopefully this will add something to it

Three easy steps to a successful gaming system, in no particular order.

1: Give the damned thing enough memory. 2 gigs doesn't cut it anymore. 4 gigs is ok, 6 gigs is preferable, and 8 gigs is more than enough. If you don't have enough memory and you start swapping, your game will chug. No matter what else you do. I haven't had a swap file in over four years, and believe me I don't miss having one. On the same note: 64 bit OS the next time you upgrade. Just do it, it's not going to be a problem.

2: Storage. Investing in a one to two hundred gig SSD, preferably with either a marvell, intel, sandforce, or samsung controller inside, is one of the best things you can do for your box. The storage access is without a doubt, the slowest performing part of a personal computer. SSD's speed this up considerably. This speeds up things like texture loads for the game. As an example, my gaming/personal system, runs with two intel 160 gig ssd's. (the old x25-m series, with 34nm flash). They were expensive, admittedly. Prices are better now. Even with them being relatively old, the storage system is extremely responsive. I prefer running them in raid-0, where they approximately match the speed of the new, sata III, sandforce drives. Roughly 500 megs a second, and about half that in writes.

PS: You can get two, or four, smaller drives, for roughly the same price. Slap them in raid-0, and watch them go ZOOOOOOOOOOOOM. There is no comparison. Hard drive based systems feel broken once you've experienced this.

PS2: Normally raid-0 can be somewhat unreliable, due to the increased potential for errors. The wear leveling algorythm's on the ssd's, alleviate this somewhat. In the entire time I've been running my raided x25's, I've never had to reinstall them to a raid error. Never, and that's not in approximately two years now. As long as one of your drives doesn't die on you, you're good to go.

3: GPU power. You want to game? Invest in a gaming grade gpu. It doesn't have to be a gtx580, or a radeon 7970. It can be a lesser card. But please be sure the card has at least one gigabyte of memory, and at least 256bit memory access. If it has the last two, it will almost certainly be 'fast enough' in terms of gpu shaders, etc, without specifying that. As a for instance, the GTX 560ti was an _excellent_ gaming card for its generation, even before they changed it up later on. Basically, you're looking at a couple hundred bucks here.

You'll notice I didn't mention the cpu itself. That's because, for the most part, the cpu itself is somewhat irrelevant. There ARE performance differences between the different cpu's, even if the other hardware is the same... but as long as the cpu is relatively modern, the difference won't be world ending. Your money is best spent on the first three things I mentioned, and the cpu (relatively) last.

As an example system, I'll recommend something a local friend just upgraded to when his E8400 setup decided to roll over on him.

He has yet to make the jump to SSD's.. I'm still convincing him. What the SSD gives you is quick booting, which admittedly is once or twice a day usually, and can be ignored by going for coffee. But it also gives you _responsiveness_ when using the computer. It's no longer click-and-wait.. it's click and 'oh, it's ready'. This is where hard drives start to feel broken.

Total cost would be 473$ plus the cost of the gpu which he carried over from his previous system, and the ssd, which in his is still a hard drive.

Point to this excersize, is it does not cost the entire world, to get a good, solid, gaming-grade system, up and running.

My last system (and his, we upgraded at roughly the same time), lasted 4 years. When you spread the cost out over that time frame, it really isn't much.

I'm the local buddy Atomic referred to above. I'll edit this post and enter real comments after I sleep.

Okay, edits start here:The main reason I'm still on the fence about SSDs is cost. Once I can wrap my head around spending about $500-1000 for the drives I would need to make SSDs my system drive and games drives (which may end up being the same 'physical' drive, especially if I decide to RAID them), then I'll probably make the jump due to the performance upgrade. The other thing I'm concerned about is the longevity of SSDs. They do have a limit on how often they can be written to, and I'm just not certain that I'd not hit that limit, so I'm hesitant about using them for that reason. My current games drive is a 600GB (or so) WD Caviar Black SATA drive (WD sales puts it at 640GB, actual formatted space is 595GB, all in one partition). I'm using 500GB of it right now, what with 60% of my Steam collection installed, WoW, WoT, TOR, STO, LOTRO, COH, GW, BBC2, Tron Evolution, Civ 4, The Witcher, and two betas I'm not sure of the NDA status, so I won't mention names

The hardware I upgraded to has been *very* good to me so far, vastly increasing my response times and general pleasure with The Old Republic, since it's truly multi-core aware (uses all four cores of the new processor). I was pleased that my System Builder edition of Win 7 Pro only needed me to click Activate again and didn't need me to call MS and convince them I wasn't installing the OS on a second PC.

SSD is a must. My only problem is deciding which games to leave on it, as I only have 128 Gigs on mine. The OS and LoTRO are on there full time, then I have to decide if a game is good enough to warrant a spot. I can't wait for the bigger SSDs to come down in price.

Logged

" And they are a strong and frightening force, impervious to, and immunized against, the feeble lance of mere reason." Isaac Asimov

Absolutely. I'm running 12gigs of ram, 2 intel 320 120gb SSD's in raid-0, a gtx580, and an i5 intel quad core at 2.8mhz and my machine is performing so much faster than when I had my 7200rpm hdd. For any mass storage (like my itunes library) I use an external usb 3.0 2TB hdd.

You might consider doing what I did, and use a small SSD drive to cache the larger hard drives with Intel's SRT technology. I'm not sure that is a great fit for you though, because it sounds like you play a lot of different games concurrently, which would have the effect of continually pushing data out of the cache. I spent 100 bucks on a Samsung 64GB SSD and am happy so far. But I tend to play one or two things at a time.

Quote from: aahzmandius on February 28, 2012, 05:04:45 AM

I'm the local buddy Atomic referred to above. I'll edit this post and enter real comments after I sleep.

Okay, edits start here:The main reason I'm still on the fence about SSDs is cost. Once I can wrap my head around spending about $500-1000 for the drives I would need to make SSDs my system drive and games drives (which may end up being the same 'physical' drive, especially if I decide to RAID them), then I'll probably make the jump due to the performance upgrade. The other thing I'm concerned about is the longevity of SSDs. They do have a limit on how often they can be written to, and I'm just not certain that I'd not hit that limit, so I'm hesitant about using them for that reason. My current games drive is a 600GB (or so) WD Caviar Black SATA drive (WD sales puts it at 640GB, actual formatted space is 595GB, all in one partition). I'm using 500GB of it right now, what with 60% of my Steam collection installed, WoW, WoT, TOR, STO, LOTRO, COH, GW, BBC2, Tron Evolution, Civ 4, The Witcher, and two betas I'm not sure of the NDA status, so I won't mention names

The hardware I upgraded to has been *very* good to me so far, vastly increasing my response times and general pleasure with The Old Republic, since it's truly multi-core aware (uses all four cores of the new processor). I was pleased that my System Builder edition of Win 7 Pro only needed me to click Activate again and didn't need me to call MS and convince them I wasn't installing the OS on a second PC.

SSD is a must. My only problem is deciding which games to leave on it, as I only have 128 Gigs on mine. The OS and LoTRO are on there full time, then I have to decide if a game is good enough to warrant a spot. I can't wait for the bigger SSDs to come down in price.

My 64GB drive is my C: with my full OS, Program Files and User folder (since losing your User folder is just about the biggest pain in the ass). If you run backups, then no big deal. That ain't what happened to me, so I decided to just manually link to larger content rather than putting my profiles on the slower, bigger drives. You could also just use the OS and add the folders on other drives to your library - I like using the junctions <shrug>.

My D: drive is a 7200RPM SATA drive that has directory junctions to it to store big monsters like Steam, Origin, etc. If I want a game on C: I just move it from its installed location to C: drive, and then build the junction.

With the PS4 and a graphics card upgrade looming, my budget is tight but I can still squeeze in a SSD upgrade. I'm looking at the Samsung 840 series 120GB drive.

Is it recommended to keep the OS and games on a separate drive the way I'm currently doing that with my SATA drives? My idea is to get one now for my OS and productivity software, but keep games on my 1TB SATA, and in a few months get a second SSD and install my games there.

Good choice. I also recomend the 240 if you can find it for a good price. That said, 120gb will still be enough for an OS and incidentals drive. Just make sure you configure windows to move My Documents and some other stuff to the other drive. Oh and definitely move the "My Downloads" folder to the other drive if you happen to use that folder.

SSD has been the best upgrade I've ever done. It's been years since I started using SSDs, but every day the power on to fully usable is incredibly fast, and I have a lot of stuff on my PC.